sation with a thirty-seven-year-old musicologist named Karen Painter, who taught at Harvard. When Vilar was hospitalized shortly afterward, Painter came to visit. Vilar seemed impressed by her academic creden- tials, and after his recovery he fre- quently mentioned them to acquain- tances. What followed amounted to, in Vilar's words, "a civilized long-dis- tance relationship." A year later, at the Bayreuth Festival, during Act III of "Lohengrin," as Lohengrin and Elsa approached the wedding bier accom- panied by the orchestral strains of the "Wedding March," Vilar slipped the Cartier diamond ring onto Painter's finger. Soon afterward, friends re- ceived an engraved notice to "save the date" of October 12, 2002. (Painter in- sists that the announcement came as a surprise to her and she never consid- o ...' .. ,\}. 4t.. , .,., I'k f', (- /i1. fro. / -,..,.,. pJ r f'-- ered herself to be engaged to Vilar.) Painter became increasingly skeptical ofVilar's purported wealth and his story of having escaped the Castro revolution. One day, she looked at his passport, and noticed that his given name was not Al- berto but Albert, and that he had been born not in Havana but in East Orange, New Jersey. When she asked him about it, Vilar said that his parents had been on a brief business trip and his mother had given birth to him before they could return to Cuba. In late September of 2002, recipients of the "save the date" cards received another engraved notice. This one said, "The event scheduled for 12 October has been postponed." The ring was returned to Vilar. According to others who have known him well, most of the life story Vilar had laid claim to was fiction. Al- though his father was indeed Cuban, (ò (ò ffi ({J . . \ \ I i" I _ "I \, / c.:z/Z.,. \ '" / r_rz- (p ,... /,/\ ,.. }J ..... '\ II/\.-. f.,.r ..... --. r _ r-.,. '-4 ,, 2r1:6 /-. 'You're right, sir-it is cute. But the last time we let one of these things in the entire kingdom was overrun with ticks, mites, and fleas. " his mother was Irish-American, and the family had never lived in Cuba. The father worked as an executive for a sugar company with offices in Manhattan. When I asked Vilar if he had em- bellished his past, he backed off the more colorful aspects, including the claim that he lived in Cuba and that the family had fled the Castro rev- olution. "We're talking about the first five years of my life. I moved to Puerto Rico when I was seven. I went to grade and high school in Puerto Rico. My father was born and raised in Cuba. He was transferred to New York, but he commuted between New York and Havana. I was raised by my grandmother to be a hundred per cent Cuban. I consider myself Hispanic." I n the spring of2003, when a woman on Vilar's staff called to renew his subscription to the Met, she was in- formed that Vilar's seats, A101 and A102, were unavailable. Vilar was hor- rified. "They had given them away!" he recalled. "Those were my seats. It was like my wife had left me." Vilar said that he didn't want any other seats, and arranged a meeting with Christine Hunter, the new chair. He demanded his seats back. 'We'll see what we can do," she said. He says that he never heard from her again. As word of Vilar's financial plight and his failure to honor his commit- ments began to spread, several mutual friends warned Lily Cates that her in- vestments with Vilar might be imper- illed. At first, she resisted the sugges- tion, pointing out the success of her early investments with him and, invok- ing their close friendship, insisting that "Alberto will always return my calls." But eventually even Cates became con- cerned. A promised interest payment of two hundred and fifty thousand dollars failed to materialize, and Vilar stopped returning her phone calls. Finally, in March of2003, he agreed to have din- ner with her at Patsy's restaurant, on West Fifty-sixth Street. Before the dinner, he sent Cates a long letter attempting to justifY his actions: Trust me when I tell you that I under- stand your frustration, and frankly shud- der at the idea that our long-standing re-